A much more lyrically eloquent and influential forerunner is Charles Mair. He was born at Lanark, Ontario, in 1838, and published, in 1868, his _Dreamland and Other Poems_. Technically, Charles Mair is a much finer craftsman than Sangster; for the latter was self-educated, whereas Mair was a university graduate who was well read in the modern English poets and had studied the forms of verse and the mechanics of versification. What, however, really constitutes Mair as the authentic forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman and Pauline Johnson as nature poets, is not the fact that he was an artistic poet of Nature in Canada, but that his _method of treating Nature_ was a _new_ method with Canadian poets. Two ‘features’ mark and distinguish the treatment of Nature in the poetry of Charles Mair—impressionistic painting of the face of Nature and the choice of the commonplace or the lowliest creatures in Nature as the subjects of his poetry. The first may have been inspired by Keats, and may be regarded as in the manner of Keats. But the second feature of Mair’s lyrical poetry—his conscious attempt to give distinction to the Commonplace in Nature in Canada;—that is original with Mair himself, and appears for the first time in Canadian poetry in Mair’s work. It is _Canadian_ in and by itself. Wilfred Campbell has alleged that Mair influenced Roberts and Lampman as Nature poets. All three were influenced by Keats, and certainly Roberts and Lampman knew the poetry of Keats more intimately than that of Mair. At least, Mair in a sense did but anticipate Roberts and Lampman in actually treating Canadian Nature. But Mair’s treatment of the commonplace was objective—being mostly a sort of philosophical or religious reflection on the meaning of the commonplace, whereas Lampman’s treatment of the same kind of subject was psychological. Mair merely looked on and interrogated Nature, Lampman communed with his lowly companions, such as the trees and the frogs, entered into their hearts, and spoke out for them, expressing their moods, feelings, and reflections. The passage from the objective treatment of Nature to the subjective interpretation of the commonplace in Nature by Canadian poets, has its _termini_ marked by Mair at the one end and Lampman at the other. Mair merely interrogates and wonders what the answer ought to be to his questions. Lampman communes with his lowly and animate companions in Nature, and, by imaginative sympathy, answers for them. These distinctions between Mair as an impressionistic Nature-_painter_ and an objective _interrogator_, and Lampman as a subjective interpreter of Nature, are nicely illustrated in Mair’s exquisitely beautiful and sensuously lovely poem, _The Fire-Flies_:—